In 1986, Jeff Koons produced “Luxury and Degradation,” an exhibition at International With Monument Gallery in the East Village. It featured reproductions of ads for alcoholic beverages and cast stainless-steel copies of novelty liquor decanters made by Jim Beam. Among these was a set of seven model railroad cars on a single track. Within each car was a fifth of Jim Beam whiskey with a tax-stamped top.
This beautiful time capsule of a show presents casts of the individual cars on separate tracks: locomotive, caboose, passenger car, baggage car, boxcar, tank car and flatbed carrying three big logs. Each is spotlighted on its own gray pedestal in the gray-walled, low-ceilinged gallery. Like reliquaries in a minimalist chapel, these gleaming, conceptually paradoxical spirit containers invite reverent meditation.
Appropriation — or, as it’s sometimes known, plagiarism — was all the rage when Mr. Koons produced the train series. Sherrie Levine had exhibited copies of famous photographs as her own works, and Haim Steinbach presented store-bought objects on sleek shelves. By appropriating cheerful toys made to sell an addictive substance, Mr. Koons implicitly criticized a modern society rent by dependency on alcohol, drugs and other consumables like mass entertainment and fossil fuels. For some people, collecting art might be an addiction, and for them these train decanters could be pure crack. But alcohol and art can be spiritually elevating intoxicants, too. That ambiguity of the sacred and the profane would continue to animate Mr. Koons’s art over the next three decades.
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